Indigenous Notions Research Articles

Historicising Mauritian self-determination at the International Court of Justice

Between 2018 and 2019, the International Court of Justice considered whether the formation and current existence of British Indian Ocean Territory violated international law. This article reveals how three temporalities – decolonial nation-state, colonial and indigenous – shaped, and were shaped by, differing conceptions of Mauritian self-determination within the Case. In doing so, this study provides an account of previously unrecognised notions of self-determination that were formative of the recent Chagos Archipelago dispute. I argue that the British delegation recasts the meaning of Mauritian self-determination as an expression of intra-colonial rights, past and present. Furthermore, I contend that Chagossian responses to the Case advanced a notion of indigeneity as having multiple moments and sites of emergence – with corresponding rights claims that extricate self-determination from a singular period and space of injustice. These colonial and indigenous conceptions of self-determination are shown to challenge, yet ultimately become subordinated to, the familiar nation-state debates on complete/incomplete Mauritian decolonisation. A focus upon representations of time does more than uncover aspects of the recent Chagos Archipelago dispute, which were structured by novel attempts to conceptualise self-determination. This article holds wider significance for post-colonial IR. The competing registers of shaped time strove to reinforce or revise what counts as post-1960 norms of self-determination.

Da energia vibrante da ancestralidade nas presas de um javali. Caça, artefatos de origem animal e povos indígenas no Brasil

This article explores the multiple sociocultural and natural connections materialized in an indigenous necklace for sale on the internet, which bears a wild boar's tooth (Sus scrofa), an invasive exotic species that is foreign to the native Brazilian fauna. Through the notion of multispecies artifact, the paper discusses notions of authenticity, ancestry and indigeneity, among others, against the background of the opposition between native/autochthonous and exotic/invasive that continues to be applied, in parallel, both to indigenous peoples in Brazil and to animals and other non-human beings. So, what happens when an indigenous people in the Northeastern Brazil, the Kariri-Xokó in Alagoas state, in their struggle for an authentic and native identity and for better living conditions, starts to produce pieces of art/craft with parts of a non-native animal surrounded by numerous ecological and political controversies? Here, I argue that artifacts such as these can be very useful for reflection on different layers of sociocultural and biocultural meaning, especially those linked to the relationships between human collectives and other-than-human beings, since such objects often seem to materialize diverse relationships – hunting, domestication, familiarization, gathering, conviviality, domination, exploration, among others – which inform us about cosmological positions, technical interactions, ethical considerations and aesthetic perceptions of animals and plants, which unfold in specific contexts of interaction that constitute complex bio-sociocultural landscapes.

Roots and Routes: Funeral Practices and Land-based Identities in the Yunnan-Tibetan Borderlands

This article analyses Pumi (Premi) funeral practices and naming customs of social groupings to interpret their idiom of ru, an indigenous notion of ‘bone’ common among Tibeto-Burman groups. I argue that the Pumi ru name marks a land-based identity constituted by the deposition of bones collected from cremation remains and the soul-guiding ritual along the ancestral migration route at funerals. On the one hand, the notion of ru refers to a conception of kinship relations that emphasises a continual connection to the same places fulfilled from birth to death, in addition to the shared bodily substance of bone. On the other hand, this connection to the land articulates both experiences of settlement and movement. Although the local translation of ru is ‘root’ in Mandarin, this form of identity is not ‘rooted’ at the current settlement but embedded in a sense of landscape constituted by past migrations and repetitive ritual journeys of souls.

Beyond Psyche: Aesthetic Attunement and Alternative Psychological Care Through the Heart

Putting aside the idea of psyche as the universal basis of personhood in Euro-American psychology, this special issue charts new ground, engaging hybrid and alternative therapies in Japan and China that center the indigenous notion of the heart— xin in Chinese and kokoro in Japanese —as the basis for developing a novel, alternative template for psychological care. Xin is both body and mind, the ground for cognition, emotion, virtue, and bodily sensation. It is less concerned with being than with living and life, and thereby troubling ontological debates. Since xin is the means by which people experience culture, a xin-based approach to mental health care brings a new vision of inclusion. It is key to the aesthetic order associated with Confucianism. Aesthetic order requires people to tune in, artfully, to yin-yang dynamism in themselves, society, and the cosmos. Optimally, this aesthetic attunement brings about a fuller, holistic relationality. Yet, cultivating aesthetic attunement at all levels of individual and social life can become a source of distress for the heart. Heart-related distress of varying intensities eludes psychiatric diagnostic categories. Contributors to this special issue explore the possibility of establishing an embodied, felt (affective), and artful (aesthetic) template of psychological care anchored in the heart.

The Sentimentalist Terrain of Ora V. Eddleman Reed’s Twin Territories Fiction

Abstract This article grapples with the messy legacy of Ora V. Eddleman Reed, editor of Twin Territories magazine in the Muscogee Nation, Indian Territory, at the turn of the twentieth century. Twin Territories vocally opposed US statehood in Indian Territory and furthered the literary careers of many Native writers. It was an important and influential venue of Native literary expression in the early twentieth century that deserves greater attention from Indigenous literary and print culture studies. However, the magazine’s ambitions and how we make sense of its legacy are complicated by Eddleman Reed’s racial politics, her own (non)citizenship, and the contents of her short sentimental fiction, all of which did as much to reinscribe racialized notions of Indigeneity as they did to challenge prevailing settler assumptions about Native people. Reed has been hailed as a recovered Cherokee writer, but her family’s rejected Cherokee Nation enrollment applications and recent genealogical research raise critical questions about framing her in this way.

Indigenous women as agents of environmental change: a study of selected Indian ecodocumentaries

ABSTRACT Mainstream feminism has always revolved around the experiences of white women and has failed to acknowledge the plight of indigenous women who were subjugated to both patriarchy and colonialism. A gendered notion of indigeneity is necessary to bring the marginalization of Indigenous women to the forefront to ensure tribal sovereignty. Indigenous women’s activism has always been distinctly connected to the environment in order to protect the community from external agencies such as companies and government bodies. Several grassroot environmental movements have emerged from the indigenous communities where women have played a pivotal role in the success of these movements. Thus, this study focuses on the environmentalism of indigenous women by analyzing selected documentaries from India i.e. Missing: Forgotten Women in India’s Climate Action Plans (2015), The Seed Guardians (2016), Agar Wo Desh Banati (2018) and Thengapalli (2020). The paper aims to recognize the struggles of these women to achieve basic environmental rights and how they promote sustainable living with the help of their traditional knowledge. Indigenous feminism will not simply be taken as a matter of identity politics, rather it will be used as a framework to understand indigenous women’s struggles as a part of a global liberation movement.

Worldview, Conflicting Spiritualities and Religious Ecology in Nigeria

Abstract This article contributes to the religion and environment field by analyzing the environmental impact of two divergent ethical responses within Nigerian Christianity. Based on different interpretations of a specific aspect of African spiritual cosmologies, African Indigenous churches (AIC s) and African independent Pentecostals (AIP s) in Nigeria have formulated conflicting spiritualities that shape their ecotheologies. Based on this same cosmology, the ecotheology of the AIC s shows continuity with the indigenous notion of sacred space which also encourages the preservation of the ecosystem especially trees and wet forests. The AIP s, on the other hand, interpret the same notion differently by segregating the public space into holy and evil ecologies. To rid these habitats of perceived evil spirits in the ecosystem, some AIP s have constructed a theology of evangelism and spiritual warfare to expel these spirits by destroying their habitats and converting such habitats into holy use such as building churches and prayer camps. Based on data obtained through observation and literature, the proliferation of prayer camps along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway is analysed as a product of these notions of holy and evil ecologies.

Place, empire, environmental education, and the Community of Inquiry

Place-based education is founded on the idea that the student’s local community is one of their primary learning resources. Place-based education’s underlying educational principle is that students need to first have an experiential understanding of the history, culture, and ecology of the environment in which they are situated before tackling broader national and global issues. Such attempts are a step in the right direction in dealing with controversial issues in a democracy by providing resources for synthesising curriculum though theory (curriculum content, including traditional subjects) and practice (practical learning as experiential education). Nevertheless, many place-based accounts discount Indigenous conceptions of place, which are integral to Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, especially in relation to the ontological relationship to Land and Country. Indigenous philosophy has the potential to inform what place-based education means by students developing a ‘sense of place’ when engaging with local communities as their ‘own’ place. In this article we re-imagine the community of inquiry as a place-responsive pedagogy by learning from Indigenous philosophy, and recentring Indigenous notions of place in experiential learning. In addition to exploring the pedagogical potential of a place-responsive account of the community of inquiry, we look to the implications for teacher preparation.

Written with the Forest

In June 2021, as research for a novel about humans and forests, I undertook a commitment to walk in the forests of Gebhurr (Mount Macedon) every day for one year, and to document the thoughts arising from each day’s encounter as an in-situ drafting exercise; in essence, to attempt to write the forest–or my experience of it. Out of this structured entanglement with the poetic possibilities of place, a novel arose. Poststructuralists have long queried the idea of the author as a text’s single originating point, just as ecologists and environmental philosophers have questioned the unique status of human subjectivity in relation to wider notions of ecological thoughtfulness. In this article, I will briefly consider what is meant by the term ‘forest’ and its history as a metaphoric terrain, before describing my own year-long in situ forest writing project. In interpreting this, I draw on existing frameworks that explore the blurred boundaries between environment and human thinking, including Freya Matthew’s ontopoetics, Vicki Kirby’s grammared biologies, and Australian Indigenous notions of narratively-patterned environments, as well as thinkers of European forests such as Bachelard and Heidegger. I draw widely from the existing research into the relationship between forests and human creativity, in order to argue that the forest may hold a legitimate claim to authorial acknowledgement of works developed within its realm.

Extreme normalcy: The place of violence in indigenous Amazonians’ well-being

While our own notions about well-being tend to foreground peaceful and amicable relations with fellow humans, for many Amazonian peoples the achievement of well-being, manifested in healthy, well-nourished and fertile bodies, requires engaging in harrowing, agonistic relations with others through warfare, shamanism, dreams and ritual practice. Drawing on the ethnography of two Lowland peoples – the Wari’ of Brazil and the Aents Chicham (Jivaro) of Ecuador and Peru, we will examine how a certain kind of person is constituted through ‘extreme’ relational experiences that, while dangerous, are considered necessary for leading a meaningful life. Further, we will discuss how the complex forms of subjectivity fostered by these experiences challenge our ideas on the presumed opacity of minds and on what psychology are about. Finally, we will show how the gradual disqualification of these extreme yet expected ways of interacting with others, following Cristianization and sustained contact with Western lifeways and forms of knowledge, leads to impoverished and monotonous lived worlds, in short to states of (ill)being antithetical to indigenous notions about proper ways of living.

Soul-foods as pharmaka: female bodies and poisons in the Upper Rio Negro

In this article, we explore the origins, properties, and ritual uses of a series of psychoactive substances among indigenous peoples of the Upper Rio Negro. Setting out from the mythical genesis of tobacco, coca, paricá, and caapi (ayahuasca), we examine the relationship between these substances and diverse aspects of female bodies and their reproductive powers, suggesting that these psychoactives can be conceived as pharmaka in the classic sense of the term, acting both to increase a person’s vital force and/or to harm and kill. As we show, these effects relate to the practice of blown magical incantations, used to both cure and provoke diseases, a connection that allows us to explore indigenous notions of life force, speech, and breath as ways through which bodies affect each other.

The wheel of history and minorities’ ‘self-sacrifice’ for the Chinese nation

ABSTRACT This article offers a theoretical intervention in new and emergent approaches to analysing China’s coercive nation-building policies under Xi Jinping. The author contends that the recent Western framing of CCP policies as genocidal or necropolitical, predicated on notions of settler colonialism and indigeneity, not only strips minority nationalities of their political agency but also prevents them from pursuing anti-colonial self-determination. By delving into the extensive scholarly work within Chinese anthropology, history, and philosophy that contributes to the reconstruction of a retrotopian Chinese nation with non-Han minority groups at its core, this article argues that the ongoing effort to build a revitalised Chinese national community requires more than merely overcoming obstacles related to minority cultures and identities. It entails actively reimagining the role and participation of minorities in ‘self-sacrifice’ for the Chinese national community, implying their voluntary relinquishment of identities and rights in order to align with the Chinese nation.

Geographies of collective responsibility: decolonising universities through place-based praxis

ABSTRACT This paper asks how can we as geographers, occupying positions of relative privilege but also beholden to institutions entangled with legacies of colonialism and ongoing colonization, find and embody our responsibilities to Indigenous people and nations and contribute to decolonization within and beyond the academy? We begin by reflecting on Doreen Massey’s (2004) theorization of geographies of responsibility and critiques of it in the intervening years. We then engage with important considerations including the politics of recognition, relational grammars of settler colonialism and Indigenous notions of relationality. To avoid the traps of recognition politics, which often foreclose the more transformative possibilities of responsibility, we propose ways of taking of decolonial responsibility in our teaching, research and professional service. While we cannot provide simple solutions to the difficult challenge of pursuing decolonization in the academy, we believe that centralizing and prioritizing relationships of responsibility to and through place in support of resurgent Indigenous nationhood is required to avoid the denuding, individualizing process of colonial recognition and superficial performative decolonisation.

Skeletons in the cupboard: reading settler anxiety in Mabo and Love

ABSTRACT Thirty years apart, Justices Brennan and Kiefel in the Australian High Court made deeply anxious remarks to define Indigenous identity and assert the power of the Court over Indigenous subjects and subjecthood in the Mabo and Love judgments. The notion that the breadth and depth of the Colonial legal system in Australia in 1992 was so frail as to break its skeleton is a form of gaslighting. Equally, the notion that in 2020 connection to Country is so fragmentable that it can mean one thing in Native Title and another in immigration manipulates an Indigenous notion of Country to fit the mould of settler power. This article analyses the judgments by considering the tone of settler anxiety and finds that in both judgments there remains a sinister logic of seeking to contain Indigenous identity and sovereignty.

Justice as inclusion: a critical conversation about inclusion and belonging

ABSTRACT Using Kovach’s conversational method and with our epistemological assumptions (knowing through embodiment, lived experience and scholarship) three leisure scholars used conversation and storytelling as method to explore current understandings of inclusion and belonging that perpetuate the violence of colonialism and the heteropatriarchy. For example, inclusion as it is often enacted is a token gesture of an organization but without making any of the structural changes necessary to ensure true belonging. Much like current rhetoric around decolonization, inclusion can become a metaphor that ultimately maintains the notion of settler futurity. Reframing inclusion to ‘justice as inclusion’ insists that practitioners and scholars, for example, de-program essentialist and capitalist notions of what we imagine Indigeneity to be, name systems of oppression and privilege, and centre Indigenous notions of relationality, including emphasizing the experience of connecting over what it means to be human, and establishing and re-establishing a connection to the non-human world.

THE EDUCATION GAP IN INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES: CANADA’S REALITY

Canada’s history with the indigenous community is a long and complex. History which spills over to current events in society and impacts the Indigenously community greatly till this day. This country has a concerning Indigenous Education Gap—a disparity in educational achievement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. The Indigenous Education Gap is widening and rising quickly across Canada. Bridging the education gap is thus a critical component of any plan for enhancing the prosperity, health, and well-being of Canada's indigenous population, as well as eliminating marginalization. Education is one of the many concerns that Indigenous people in Canada must tackle. The acts of previous Canadian administrations, both implicit and explicit, have resulted in a considerable educational disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous pupils. The western system of education is inherently exclusive, and its fundamental educational process is based on privilege. Resolving the enormous and ongoing inequalities in student educational learning results must be based on Indigenous notions of education, rather than a standard western/colonial approach

Commodifying Indigeneity? Settler Colonialism and Racial Capitalism in Fair Trade Farming in Palestine

Abstract The recent proliferation of settler colonial and Indigenous studies of Palestine have addressed the historical and present-day enclosure of Palestinian land, yet the question of ‘indigeneity’ is underexamined in this literature. Claims to indigeneity in Palestine straddle varied definitions: a racial category; as constructed through the colonial encounter or preceding colonialism; and as a local relation or an international juridico-political category. Using discourse analysis and ethnography of a specific Palestinian sustainable agriculture initiative, I show how for Palestinians, claiming indigeneity brings into tension potential political economic gains, social relations of struggle, and discursive formations of collective subjectivity. A valorisation and commodification of indigeneity as a racial category narrows notions of indigeneity to the biological-cultural, offering challenges for Palestinian struggles for sovereignty. I conclude by asking what theorising from Palestine offers to Marxist theories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, and whether indigeneity can exceed its commodification.

Indigeneity and Indigenous Politics: Ground-breaking Resources

The purpose of this article is to relate the very important question of the autonomy of indigenous peoples to freely make decisions about their life with the notion of indigeneity, reconceptualised as a socially constructed and deeply contested resource. Resources are more than mere static assets or quantities of matter waiting to be measured, explored or protected. Something becomes a resource through joint processes of quantification, valuation, and normalisation. Along these lines, indigeneity is not just the ascertainment of something or someone in relation to ‘somewhat else’, but a nexus of indigenous peoples’ self-realisation and political intervention. To be indigenous is to exist politically in space and in relation to antagonist forces and processes that constantly downgrade their ethnic and social condition. Indigeneity is, thus, a resource that presupposes the value and the fight for their rights and for other (so-called) indigenous resources found in their lands. The main contribution here is the claim that indigeneity is a ground-breaking resource and a reaction formulated in the interstices of the old and new machineries of market-oriented coloniality. Indigeneity is reinterpreted as a special, highly politicised resource that directly and indirectly opposes processes of world grabbing and the appropriation of other territorialised resources from indigenous areas. It is concluded that indigeneity, as a resourceful resource, has become a key factor in the process of external and internal recognition, which galvanises political mobilisation and instigates novel forms of interaction. What makes indigenous peoples more and more unique is also what makes them share a socio-political struggle with allied, subaltern social groups.

Indigenous Peoples and Criminal Justice

Abstract In this article, I draw on the specific case studies of the Xakriabá people and the Judicial District of Manga, and the Maxakali people and the Judicial District of Águas Formosas, both located in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. I examine how criminal justice officials apply dominant concepts of indigeneity in these regional contexts, showing how they arbitrarily construct and deploy the category of Indigenous person based on essentialist assumptions of indigeneity that ignore Indigenous peoples’ self-identification as such. This adds to scholarship on how indigeneity is institutionally conceived and applied within the justice system in ways that contrast with Indigenous notions of it and aim to deny Indigenous persons recognition in legal processes. By providing specific accounts of how Indigenous defendants are treated in the justice system and experience loss of rights, I consider the professional practices of state officials within the broader framework of Brazilian indigenist policies.

Inalienable Dignity: Writing Counterhegemonic Universal Human Rights Histories

Abstract Human rights doctrine is founded on a notion of universality and inalienability. However, critics of the dominant formulation of “universal” human rights claim that it privileges Western epistemology and does not adequately reflect the histories and lived experiences of Indigenous communities. This has prompted calls for a more inclusive conceptualization and theorization of human rights that takes equal account of Indigenous histories and rights traditions. This article makes a case for reconceptualizing universal human rights to reflect the epistemologies of historically marginalized communities. Drawing on debates in African history, it calls for a counterhegemonic approach to human rights that goes beyond possessive individualism and the neoliberal, state-centered rights model. To be truly universal, international human rights must take equal account of the communal and collectivist ethos that underpins Indigenous notions of human dignity.